Iron Tower Studio's The Age of Decadence was a classic over a decade in the making. Its vaporware status was legendary during that time, which is why many found it surprising when they managed to release Dungeon Rats, a party-based, combat-centric spinoff title set in the same universe, just over a year later. How did the studio cope with such a radically shorter development timeline than they were used to? We decided it made sense to enlist Darth Roxor, who reviewed their original game for us, to investigate that question. His verdict? Dungeon Rats is a game full of tiresome monster battles, with a narrative best ignored. It's an affront to his definition of what a dungeon crawler is...and an easy buy for Age of Decadence combat fans. But I'll let the man speak for himself:

As one would expect, the game shines the most during the fights against humans. This is true because of all the reasons that made AoD combat great – humans are the most tactically diverse in terms of abilities, weaponry, armour, etc, which makes almost every fight against them unique to some extent. Furthermore, they use many more dirty tricks than before. While in AoD someone would throw a net at you every now and again, in DR nets are a constant threat, not to mention alchemical support like acid, grenades and liquid fire (nevermind that the AI isn’t very good at handling them). Some of these fights are so stacked against you that trying to crack them is a real pleasure, even if you have to reload a dozen times to try out different approaches. While I wish I could say something more about this encounter design category, I feel that I would just be repeating most of my points from my earlier review of AoD.

But then you have the monsters, which are more or less the anti-thesis to everything that makes AoD combat good. Sure, the first time a new monster type appears, you might be surprised by what it can do, and act accordingly to counter it. However, monsters don’t really go beyond 2 types (and even that is usually limited to “small scorpion”, “big scorpion”), and don’t present any tactical flexibility. They are simply one-trick ponies that stop being interesting dangerously fast. Scolopendras rush forward and hit you and poison you, and that’s it. Same goes for scorpions and ants. You’ve been to one of these fights, and you’ve been to them all, especially considering that the monsters usually aren’t mixed with anything else, following the encounter segmentation policy. Now compare that predictability to humans, where a guy labelled “swordsman” can just as well have a few pila handy, poison on his blade and a net in his pocket, which will all be unknown to you until you’ve seen him use it.

However, the monsters can get worse and drift even further from AoD combat design by having multitudes of immunities stacked on them. At one point in the game, you enter a zone that could be called Construct City. The constructs are the very embodiment of bad design in Dungeon Rats, although they’ve also been featured in AoD, but there they were not as prominent. You can’t knock them down, you can’t poison them, you can’t cripple their arms or legs, you can’t move them in any way, and you can’t manoeuvre around them, because they have AP up the ass, and all the combat areas including them are completely open. Meanwhile, what can they do? Bumrush and stab you in the face with two attack types, that’s all. The options you typically have against overwhelming odds are thus reduced to more or less two: stack up on the heaviest armour you can find (or craft) or spam all the alchemical stuff you have at hand. Apart from that, all you can do is take a rosary and pray to RNGesus.

[...] The gameworld, as it is presented, makes little to no sense at all, but criticising it for that would be unfair, as its chief function is to lead you from fight to fight. The story and writing are similarly insignificant, often even bordering on half-arsed. While this is acceptable for short texts that are basically “you enter the room, when SUDDENLY ENEMIES! [insert pop-culture reference/cheeky one-liner here]”, it can get really jarring when Iron Tower decides to delve into some sort of backstory for the mine. This backstory is delivered through a handful of shamelessly info-dumpy NPCs, which are not only terribly written, but also so well-informed and eager to share their vast troves of deep lore that you can forget about chasing any mysteries – everything is laid out perfectly in front of you. The background for the prison in Dungeon Rats could serve as an interesting premise for something, but that would have to take a different game with a different mindset behind it.

However, while it’s very easy (and advisable) to dismiss the narrative side of the dungeon as unimportant, the same can’t be said about the general level design, and here we arrive to what is perhaps Dungeon Rats’ greatest flaw.

The game is marketed as a “dungeon crawler”, but I really do beg to differ. When viewing player opinions about Dungeon Rats, you will often come across people saying that they “typically don’t like dungeon crawlers, but really like Dungeon Rats”. A hypothesis can be drawn from this – the game is actually not a dungeon crawler at all. And I will tell you why.

A successful dungeon crawler needs much more than just entertaining combat to work. It also needs a properly set-up dungeon, with all that it entails. It has to be decently labyrinthine, it needs a generous amount of optional content to explore, it needs some non-combat interaction, preferably puzzles of some kind, it needs traps, it needs secrets or mysteries to uncover, and it needs proper resource management. In a sense, the dungeon should be an entity of its own, even an enemy. Meanwhile, Dungeon Rats is anything but the above.

[...] As you can see, there is not really much to tell. Dungeon Rats is, overall, a competently made combat romp using the Age of Decadence ruleset and engine. For the most part, it’s a fun little game, and some of its more difficult fights will give you adequate challenge. The fact that it costs barely 9 bucks and that a single playthrough will take you roughly 10 hours (+/- 2) also makes it easier to gloss over some of its flaws. In essence, if you’re a fan of AoD combat, you can practically get it blind.

However, the flaws are definitely there, and in some ways they are a huge step back from Age of Decadence, even despite the game’s completely different focus and design philosophy. It also bears repeating that Dungeon Rats suffers from a serious case of false advertisement, and, while enjoyable, it is definitely not a dungeon crawler. And although I don't have a problem with the formula itself, which could be described as "RPG Encounters: The Game", the term "dungeon crawler" carries with it a set of specific connotations that need to be met, and someone seeking it in this game could simply feel cheated.

To achieve what they've set out to do, Iron Tower would have to put in a lot more effort into Dungeon Rats because, to quote a classic, simply making your game all about combat does not a dungeon crawler make. Perhaps they should settle for a different label of some kind - "dungeon brawler", for instance, would fit right in.​

It's been twenty days since the release of Obsidian Entertainment's latest RPG, Tyranny. The rough consensus that has emerged on our forums during that time seems to be that Tyranny is an often interesting game with a commendable focus on choice & consequence, but let down by lackluster combat design and cut corners. A return to form for Obsidian, some might say! Our review, courtesy of Prime Junta, reflects this public opinion fairly closely - which makes the drama surrounding its publication over the past two days seem a bit silly, if you ask me. But now you can make up your own minds about it. It's got the good:

These choices matter. Play the game three times making different choices along the way, and the experience will be dramatically different each time. Story-gated locations and quests will open up or be closed off. You will find yourself shoulder to shoulder with characters you condemned to death by torture or slew by your own hand in a previous game. You will learn more of the world of Terratus and its inhabitants every time. You will also fail to achieve your goals, for want of sufficient cunning, force, reputation, or your previous choices, many of them all the way from the starting sequence.

If you play Tyranny like you’re used to playing cRPGs, or if you’re expecting the type of freedom you get in an exploration-based, sandbox game in the vein of a Fallout or Arcanum, you might miss out on a lot of this branching. Simply running errands for your chosen faction leader will get you to the endgame, and the smaller choices you have made along the way will affect it. If you only play through the game once, the experience won’t feel much different from a typical, linear game, however.

Things get more interesting if you inject a bit of role-play into the role-playing game, set yourself an agenda, and attempt to push against what the waiter presses on you. If you want to be a secret rebel sympathiser and stick to that from the start, you can do that and see the consequences play out. If you’re a true believer in Kyros’ mission but consider the warring factions’ loyalties suspect, you can ally with one of them out of expediency, undermine the alliance every opportunity you get, and ultimately bring the perfidious Archon to face his just deserts before the impassive face of Tunon the Archon of Law. And if you just want to carve yourself a realm to rule on your own, you can do that too. Some of these paths aren’t exactly easy, and many will be blocked off entirely due to choices you made very early in the game. Have the rebel leaders executed, and you won’t be able to join the rebellion later on even if you’re having second thoughts about your current loyalties.​

It's got the bad:

What’s more, each of the three spellcaster companions has a talent tree with spells which eclipse the sigil-based magic, especially during the first two-thirds of the game. Lantry’s “Preservation” tree, for example, has by far the best healing spells in the game. The player character does not have access to similarly powerful specialised magic: although one of your talent trees is called “Magic,” it is actually mostly about enhancing weapon attacks with a magic staff, which a caster PC won’t be doing much anyway since he’ll be chain-casting those cooldown-based spells. The non-Magic trees have some spell-like talents which put the actual spells to shame too: your most impressive fireball isn’t actually a spell or in the magic tree at all, it’s a talent in the Ranged tree that makes your javelin go kaboom. Overall, the system feels incoherent, shallow, and restrictive. The classless system fails to deliver the flexibility you would expect in one, and leaves you just as locked into your chosen role – damager, tank, archer, caster – as you would be in a class-based system.

The skill system is based on learn-by-doing which you can complement by buying training from trainers. Level advancement is also contingent on exercising your skills. Support skills like Subterfuge (lockpicking and sneaking) and Athletics will quickly become trivial as they will overshoot all the thresholds in the game: past Act 1, I didn’t encounter a single skill-thresholded check I couldn’t pass. The only skill to which I did pay attention was Lore, and that only when intentionally focusing on the spell system. The best that can be said of it is that it does function as a leveling-up mechanism, and there aren’t that many obvious ways to abuse it. It does not do much to promote creative character-building, reward specialisation, or encourage looking for alternative solutions to challenges.

Tyranny’s gameplay problems are something of an own goal for Obsidian. Pillars of Eternity has an excellent character mechanics system. They could easily have leveraged its classes, abilities, talents, and skills in addition to the basic engine features, with a light re-skinning to fit the Bronze Age setting, and given some of its massive bestiary the same treatment. If D&D can do anything from Oriental Adventures to Dark Sun and the Infinity Engine could accommodate both Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, the Eternity Engine could surely have accommodated Tyranny. The systems the team built to replace Pillars’ are shallow, incoherent, and unenjoyable. They make the gameplay as formulaic, rote, and uninspired as the world-building and campaign are exciting, confident, and original.​

And here's the final verdict:

Tyranny has the makings of a cult classic. The depth and originality of the setting, the integration of the most unique features of the setting into the gameplay, the presentation, and the dizzying variety of adventures to choose give it replayability and lasting appeal that few games can manage. The game ends on a cliffhanger, so it is clear that Obsidian wants to produce a sequel. If and when they do, I hope they will give serious thought to making the game as fun to play as it is engrossing to explore.

While cooldown-based gameplay is inherently problematic – it is really hard not to have it devolve into rote pushing of awesome-buttons as timers wind down – it doesn’t have to be a total chore: Dragon Age: Origins demonstrated that much. More imaginative dungeons and encounters, a bigger and more varied bestiary, a better and more clearly-differentiated magic and ability system, and overall balance tilted to favour attack over defence would help bring its combat up to DA:O standards at least, if ditching the cooldowns altogether is not on the cards.

I would dearly love to see more games give the kind of attention to world-building, story branching, choice, and consequence that has gone into Tyranny. Other than Age of Decadence, coincidentally also set in a grim pre-Medieval world, this hasn’t been done in this scale in recent years. Tyranny feels like a great tabletop campaign by a gamemaster who digs worldbuilding and intrigue but isn’t into dungeon crawling or the fighty bits in general. That is a shame, as games are made to be played rather than read or watched. As it stands, Tyranny is worth a spin despite the gameplay rather than because of it. Kyros demands better.​

Our award winning Gamescom coverage continues apace with four of our most popular reports to date.

First we take a look at Vampyr, the next masterpiece from the creators of Life is Strange:

As I see it, Vampyr's biggest selling point is not about butchering hundreds of vampire hunters, or suffering through self-serious barely interactive dialogues; it's about meeting the NPCs of London, learning about their lives, and then choosing who among them should live and who should die. The designers have made the intriguing decision that sucking the life out of friendly NPCs should be the primary source of experience points in the game. Can't beat a difficult battle? Want to unlock a cool skill? Well, then you gotta find somebody you don't like, and get rid of them in a permanent fashion.​

Then we cast a glance towards ELEX, the next masterpiece from the creators of Risen 2:

Jarl: Well, from what you've shown us so far, it really looks like you're saying “Okay, we're now gonna serve you a big fresh helping of Gothic 2!”

Bubbles: [rolls his eyes in a shameful betrayal of his partner]

Jenny: No, this is no Gothic.

Jarl: ...different, but in terms of the principles, of the level design….. ….? …??

Jenny: Well, it's… it's... One is one thing, and one is another. We have deliberately not made a new Gothic. And we think that it would have been a bad idea to make a new Gothic 4 or 5. At the current time, at least. Why? You ask three Germans: “What should the new Gothic have?” And you get at least five different answers. The expectations are there: [raises her arm real high]. And we cannot meet them. Even if we wanted to – if we hired 25 new people – it would not be possible to release a Gothic – right now! – where people would say “whoa, that's great!” Not possible. “Basically, we want exactly what's been done before, but not what's been done before!” And that doesn't work.

And so we thought: let's rather do something that we've had in our heads for a long time anyway, something that we would enjoy making, something where we can use old gameplay mechanics that worked well, which we really liked, where people are saying “that was great!” – we take those on board, and we make a new setting with fresh ideas, a new story that nobody is familiar with, and then we make a great game. And that's ELEX.​

And let's not forget about The Guild 3, which brought some pleasant complexity into the console-dominated Gamescom landscape:

Bubbles: We had a discussion on our forums about the fact that the Guild games are still PC-exclusive, even in this modern age. Why is that – is the UI too complex for consoles?

Heinrich: ...we once tested a version [of an earlier Guild game] on the Xbox; it worked, but the controls were terrible. And it's the same way now; you can make a port to the newest Xbox relatively quickly – so we could get a version for the Xbox One or Xbox 360 pretty quickly – but we see absolutely no way of implementing a proper control scheme with a gamepad. It's just impossible. The game is too complex.

[At this point he notices that Jarl is making inefficient deals at the marketplace, and spends a minute showing him how to do it properly] You should buy a cart to transport your goods… slow down the game speed! No, click there… now, click this first, and then here…

Bubbles: It's nice that these kinds of games are still being made.​

Indeed. Finally, Battle Chasers: Nightwar provides us with a valuable insight of its own:

And really, if the guy who made flippin' Darksiders is making a turn based RPG, then what the hell is stopping today's Obsidian from doing the same thing? Get with the times already! The future is turn based!​

Thanks to Konjad's persistence, "Quickies" have become something of a not-so-proud and not-so-venerable tradition here on the Codex - to the extent that other people submit them now, too. A quickie is essentially a loose and very cursory presentation of a game that the author wants you to try, but is too lazy to do a full review.

This time the game-done-quick is Voidspire Tactics, a niche and not too well-known indie tactical RPG that has been generally favorably received in its dedicated thread on our forums. The write-up belongs to esteemed community member Jack Dandy, who also conducted a brief interview with the developer to complement his piece. Here's an excerpt from the quickie:

Now, the most interesting aspect of this is that you can switch your character’s class at any given moment (outside of battle) AND have a Primary and Secondary class. This means that you get to mix and match the skillsets of any 2 classes you have unlocked, PLUS you can combine up to three of any of the Passives your character has unlocked among the different classes.

Customization is the name of the game here. You can make each character really stand out and not risk a penalty for experimentation.

Want to make your guy a standard melee damage dealer? Take a Warrior/Blade.
Want to make a ranger who’s able to fire off a variety of elemental crossbows without reloading once? Take a Sharpshooter/Rogue along with the Scout’s passive “Quick hands” perk.
Want to make a monk who can punch people’s faces just as well as toasting them with a fireball? An Elementalist/Brawler is the way to go.

There are lots of creative ways to build your team, and it’s all done in an intuitive, enjoyable way.​

And here's one from the interview:

- What inspired you to develop your own game?

My inspiration is basically from playing and enjoying other games - especially games that are really great, but have a handful of small issues. I always want to see what the game would be like without those issues - and the only way to do that is make my own.

Voidspire Tactics in particular was inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Ultima VII. I wanted to try to eliminate the weaknesses of each - specifically, FFT's systemic oddities & imbalances, and Ultima VII's uninteresting combat. Dozens of other games had a minor influence as well. Some that come to mind are Zelda (for its exploration), Legend of Mana (its thorough customization), and Dark Souls (its open, you-can-handle-yourself attitude).​

As older Codex denizens may recall, there used to be a company called Troika Games and they made what some would say were fairly good RPGs. In 2005, however, they had to close due to financial issues, to much sadness here on the Codex and elsewhere. Troika's co-founders - Jason Anderson, Leonard Boyarsky, and Tim Cain - were scattered to the wind, adrift and working on games better left unmentioned, until Tim Cain ended up at Obsidian. Surprisingly enough, leaving what was perceived by many people as his cushy job at Blizzard, Leonard Boyarsky followed suit just earlier this year. This interview is, as far as we know, the first interview with him since the move.

All kudos go to esteemed community member Jedi Master Radek for organizing and conducting the interview, to our forum users who submitted their questions, and, of course, to Leonard and Obsidian for making this possible.

Here are a few snippets from the full thing:

Why did you leave Blizzard?

I really, really, really, really, really wanted to return to making single player RPGs.

Since you and Tim are back together now, has there been any contact with Jason Anderson? Are you still friends? Any pipe dreams of getting back together?

We’re still friends with Jason, we get together for a Troika lunch a few times a year.

So, of course, I would love to work with him again someday, but it wouldn’t be as simple as us just picking up where we left off. When we worked on Fallout and started Troika, Jason, Tim and I all had our own specific skills which complemented each other's well. But it's been over ten years, we've all had vastly different experiences, and our areas of expertise have shifted and grown (hopefully), so it wouldn't just be a matter of us getting back together and sliding into our old roles, we'd have to figure out the balance again.

What's your dream game that you'd like to make? And when are we getting Bloodlines 2 or Arcanum 2? What Troika game would you like to make a sequel to the most?

I'm happy to say that I'm currently working on my dream game. As far as sequels, it's Arcanum 2, hands down. I'd much rather work on IPs of my own creation. That doesn't mean I wouldn't work on Bloodlines 2 if given the opportunity, but if I had a choice between them it's an easy call to make.

How did the early draft for Fallout 2's story and locations look like before you left Black Isle? How was it changed for the final game? What direction were you planning to steer the story and the world?

You have to remember that this was twenty years ago, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think, overall, it stayed pretty close to our original design. There was a lot of work that had to be done to fill in the blanks when we left, but they followed much of what we had laid out. Except they added talking death claws. If we had stayed, I guarantee there would have never been talking, intelligent death claws.

An idea which may or may not have ever actually made it in (and may have been their genesis) was that you could find a death claw egg and hatch it, and the death claw would become a follower. The joke was that, in order to not have everyone freak out when you walked into town, you could put a cloak on him - which would have effectively made him look like a slightly larger version of a normal NPC in a cloak (with a hidden face). When combat started, he would throw off the cloak and inexplicably grow to his correct size. This was suggested as a way we could do it without adding animations for him (we could just use NPC anims), and as a way to not add reactions for walking into town with him. However, you need to keep in mind that a lot of ideas started out silly, just to make us laugh, and we would evolve them into their darker versions as we went. I have no idea how the death claw follower would have played out had we stayed. But he wouldn't have spoken.

It was supposed to be very haunting and mysterious when you showed up to Vault 13 - the legends of your tribe told of many who tried to get in and failed, and you show up and the door is open and the whole vault is empty.

Do you think there's too much focus on balancing everything to perfection in modern games?

I have no idea what you possibly could be referring to.​

The interview also includes questions about VtMB's and Fallout's cut content, Fallout's early concepts, contemporary games with good art style (aka 1eyedking bait), and more - including an exclusive peek at how Leonard and Tim settle their disagreements.

Our Gamescom coverage continues at its customary breakneck pace. In this instalment we're covering Expeditions: Viking by Logic Artists as well as Obsidian's latest masterpiece Tyranny, the Asian Kickstarter sensation Masquerada by Witching Hour Studios, four games by Daedalic (Silence, State of Mind, The Long Journey Home, and Shadow Tactics), and finally Streum on Studio's Space Hulk: Deathwing and Cyanide's Styx: Shards of Darkness. All in a day's work.

...Overall, I'm quite happy with the current state of the combat in Expeditions: Viking; it still seems to need a fair bit of balance and AI work, and many of the active combat abilities still have to be implemented, but even in this early state it already feels genuinely fun and tactical to play.

... Unfortunately, our [Tyranny] session didn't feature any dialogue or c&c at all; instead, we spent a few minutes discussing the new spellcrafting mechanics before launching into a short dungeon delve where we got to experience various puzzles, fought lots and lots of mobs, and had a big boss battle... The overall experience reminded me quite strongly of the boss battles in Aarklash: Legacy.

... Remember how I said Masquerada was not my type of game because it's too linear and doesn't have much interactivity? Well, at least Masquerada is still a game. [Silence] is a barely interactive movie, and from the hands-on I played of it, my impression is that it would actually be better off as a movie.

...The auteur was Martin Ganteföhr and the masterpiece-to-be is his new sci-fi adventure game State of Mind. You might be familiar with Ganteföhr from his previous work, which includes beloved classics like The Mystery of the Druids, The Moment of Silence, and Overclocked. Ganteföhr began his presentation with an extensive introduction to the life and work of Ray Kurzweil, the visionary author of “The Singularity Is Near” and “Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever”...

... In short, The Long Journey Home looks to be a fun, if somewhat casual Space RPG/Roguelike with a few interesting mechanics; I'm definitely going to play it.

... Shadow Tactics is being pitched as a “modern take” on the real time tactics genre, in the vein of the old Commandos and Desperados titles...

...At its core, Deathwing is a game where you blast hordes of enemies into tiny pieces with your squad of heavily armoured Space Marines. Your characters have access to a vast range of Warhammer-based weaponry, from heavy flamers to miniguns, as well as an array of powerful psychic abilities. You equip your crew, send them to one of the many derelict “Space Hulk” vessels drifting through space, and then you start blowing up swarms of Tyranid Genestealers. There is some sort of storyline attached to all the killing and maiming, but it doesn't seem particularly important to the gameplay.

...[Styx: Shards of Darkness] is even simpler to describe: it's a direct sequel to Styx: Master of Shadows, featuring the same methodical third person stealth gameplay as the first title.​

The full article includes a variety of hideous selfies, a highly awkward interview centered around an amateur fantasy novelist from Thailand, and a lengthy rant about Tyranny's UI design. In other words, it's a typical Codex piece.

Ion Storm's Deus Ex belongs to the Codex's all-time beloved classics, and even the 2011 Deus Ex: Human Revolution earned a place in our Top 75 RPG list. This year, Eidos Montreal released a sequel to Human Revolution, called Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, set two years after that game's events. Does it improve on or at least match the level of quality of its predecessor, or is it more of a mixed bag?

According to esteemed community member TNO, it is unfortunately the latter. Here are a few excerpts from his review:

One of the dividends of increasing technology is the mission environments in Mankind Divided have generally gotten bigger, and so they more closely approach the near-perfection of the original Deus Ex. Pallisade Bank is perhaps the best example: huge, multi-level with executive offices, lobby, vaults, connected with a labyrinth of hidden and not-so-hidden passages with lots of points of entry and egress, and similarly lots of things to uncover and find (it also benefits synergistically from being an interesting concept: a data-bank and vault for information that generally lies beyond national jurisdiction). Generally the median level of Mankind Divided approaches the most 'open' levels of Human Revolution (e.g. Hengsha Docks, Court gardens), and this move in mission design is to be warmly welcomed, although the continued reliance on air-ducts and ventilation systems for many of these alternative routes does give a blemish.

Mankind Divided has moved steadily more towards 'open world' principles too. Probably 70% or so of the game content is off the critical path, and a Codex Let's Player managed to finish the game in around 4 hours by ignoring it. They probably missed out: the 'side-quest' content is very good, covering a good mix of police procedural and espionage: a murder mystery plot is one highlight, the player's tracking down of a 'black market media' organization that threatens to blow cover of another group another, and piecing together the backstory behind a new, highly (but selectively) lethal recreational drug the same. [...]

Perhaps the most noteworthy innovation in Mankind Divided is in the field of avarice. Much of the utterly rubbish microtransaction and monetization typically in the ambit of low-rent mobile games come out in force. There's the wholly indefensible shop where you can pay real money to buy Praxis kits for your character, the entirely unnecessary and tacked on breach mode with semi-randomized rewards and microtransactions galore, the stupid mobile app integration, and the pre-order and extra item DLCs. These are all mercifully unnecessary and can be ignored during the course of the game, but they represent the early signs of metastasis of pay-to-win and monetization to single player games where they were heretofore mercifully absent. Would that the radioactive criticism the developers have received from all quarters put this cancerous development firmly in remission. [...]

The player generally expects plot arcs to have a resolution, and for characters to develop during the course of the story: subverting these expectations in the narrative can work well, and can be a fop to verisimilitude: in real life, people's characters do not always develop in step with some grander narrative, and you don't always get all the answers. Do it too much, though, and the player suspects you are not even trying (or, worse, hope to spin things out for sequels and DLC). Mankind Divided falls into the latter category. It is actually slightly worse than a hypothetical Deus Ex that stopped after UNATCO: at least in that you have learned something. In Mankind Divided, although you solve the initial case, the bulk of the narrative interest is in the underlying actions of the players 'behind the scenes', and this plot merely treads water: Adam Jensen (and you) haven't really learned anything about the world that you didn't already know at the start.

Conclusion: Not enough steps forward, a few steps back

Mankind Divided is so near and yet so far. Its elements mostly build upon the strong foundations of Human Revolution, but occasionally they retreat back from earlier triumphs, and leave some major flaws uncorrected. It is cleverly written but with a few too many mis-steps, and a central lacuna around the player character himself. At its best, the strengths of the game combine harmoniously to produce one of the best opening thirds in computer gaming; the fatal weakness is that it is no more than an opening third, and the game ends on a deeply imperfect cadence with too many themes undeveloped, leave alone resolved.

The game indicates considerable talent, and the writing team know their craft well. My hope is that the impressive story Mankind Divided intimates has been mostly written, and that subsequent additions to the franchise will adroitly fulfill the undoubted promise manifest here. Yet these games do not yet exist, and thus Mankind Divided remains a promissory note for a series of games which in combination may form a masterpiece. Unless and until that happens, this opening act, despite its qualities, cannot justify its own purchase.​

Our chronicle of Bubbles and JarlFrank's visit to Gamescom 2016 continues. In this chapter, we discover what JarlFrank was up to during Bubbles' long stay at the Larian booth, when he departed to check out TaleWorlds' Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and Warhorse's Kingdom Come: Deliverance. We also get a look at various other games that they saw, such as Grimlore's SpellForce 3, Pixel Federation's Morning Men and Ubisoft's South Park: The Fractured But Whole. JarlFrank was pretty happy with what he saw of Mount & Blade and Kingdom Come. Here are his thoughts on the latter:

And thus ends the presentation of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and it was one of the most impressive presentations at this year's Gamescom. It has come so far from last year's early build, so much more content and gameplay was implemented, and the multiple approaches to the quest we were shown looked really great.

Last year, only the sword combat was implemented. Now, they also have polearms and daggers, and in the enemy camp we've seen a couple of guys doing some unarmed sparring with each other. Unarmed combat is non-lethal, and we were told that you can challenge most NPCs to a friendly duel if you want to.

I really like the disguise mechanic, and the stealth gameplay looked pretty damn good. Coupled with an AI that is aware of changes - such as shunning the food if they discover one of their comrades dead from poison, or sending out some men to look for the missing patrol if you kock out or kill them all - this looks to be a game where dicking around and trying out different approaches is going to be a lot of fun.

I'm really looking forward to the game and hope that most quests will be designed as openly as this one. And, as everyone who remembers Bethesda's pre-release Radiant AI videos knows, gameplay presentations like this can be treacherous. I really hope that all of this was as real and unscripted as we were made to believe. I'm willing to give Warhorse Studios the benefit of the doubt there. The presenter gave the impression that sometimes, he really didn't know what was going to happen, and the player was very cautious in his actions, especially when there was a danger of being detected - and they reloaded the game once, and NPC reactions were different each time.

This made this such an interesting presentation: they actually showed some live gameplay rather than a pre-recorded video, and this showed the dynamic elements of the gameplay, such as AI reactions, much more effectively than a pre-recorded video would've done.

If everything we were shown during this presentation makes it into the game, we'll have a real gem on our hands. Explorefags are going to love this shit.
​

SpellForce 3, on the other hand, was not what Bubbles had hoped for:

Bubbles: The last time we were here, we heard about a stronghold mechanic. Is that still in the game?

Dev: No. We have…really, the focus is...we have this one giant pillar of bringing these immersive RPG aspects, like character progression, abilities and items, together and merge them with the base building. You can see the dialogue window, and it isn't pausing the game. You really focus on that, that you never pause the game when we have a dialogue, and that will be the main source of the whole experience that brings it together.

Bubbles: So the stronghold is gone, basically?

Dev: Err… in the campaign there will be a hub level.

Bubbles: Like a village? Or a city?

Dev: Yes, something like that, and you can improve that... ...you'll find the master smith, and he will join you, and he will say "okay, I will make much better swords for your human army." And the human army is permanently improved from that point onward.

Bubbles: Are there still dungeon levels with lockpicking, disarming traps, and so forth?

Dev: ...no... ...there are dungeons in the game, but... there will be... ah... locked chests, and there will be a lockpicking ability, but it will be rather simple. If the lock is a certain level, and if your hero has a lockpicking ability, he can open it.

Bubbles: There was talk that the story would have political intrigue and some complex stuff in it.

Dev: We have political intrigue, but it is still a high fantasy story. It's true to the lore of Spellforce. You'll get all the elements you know and hopefully loved from the older Spellforce games in the game.​

While we're waiting for the next Gamescom report, let's insert a brief pentaquickie. With the fifth entry to our prestigious Quickie review series Konjad takes us on a voyage through Turgor, Tension, and The Void, different versions of a game published by Ice-Pick Lodge. Technically not an RPG the game nevertheless managed to win Konjad's affection.

The Void is the most unique and enjoyable game I have ever played. Visuals are astounding, the soundtrack is a delight, the gameplay is engaging and the dialogues are enchanting. Tension gives so much joy that after finishing one playthrough I instantly began another one to reach a different ending that is more difficult to achieve. I have an impression, however, that this game is not for everyone. Nonetheless, those who will be sucked into it will be held spellbound. To appreciate this game you must have an open mind towards unusual games, enjoy gloomy settings and imbibe poetry. In my opinion, whatever your taste in games is, Turgor deserves your time to give it an honest try. Do keep in mind, however, that it is one of the most difficult games I have ever played and the player is constantly faced with a challenge to stay alive and to cultivate enough colors for himself and for the sisters. I only completed the game successfully during my fourth playthrough, failing the first three attempts. This might discourage a lot of people considering most modern games are made to be completed without much difficulty in the very first try.

Is the game really that good or is Konjad just a young, impressionable nerd swayed by the female nudity in this game? Discuss!

Last year, we sent Bubbles and JarlFrank to Gamescom, the annual video game trade fair in Cologne, Germany. The resulting multi-part report was one of the finest pieces of content the Codex has ever produced, and so when August came around, it was a no-brainer to send them there again. I can already tell you that our Gamescom report this year is going to break new records. For its first part, though, we'll start small - not with an article covering a dozen different games, but just one very important one. Bubbles and JarlFrank expected to have just half an hour with Divinity: Original Sin 2. They ended up spending almost three hours with it. Here's some of what they learned:

Bubbles: Since you mentioned the origin stories, let's talk about the writing…. I've played more of this version than I played with the prototype, but I still remember what was on the prototype. I saw some changes in the prototype from the original game, but I wasn't fully convinced that it had changed. What I'm seeing now is a radically different style of writing; stunning, absolutely...

Swen: I'm happy to see that you recognize it.

Bubbles: It's hard to imagine it being in the same game series. Bioware sometimes changes writing throughout their game series, but I can't think of many companies that would allow an example like this; this is actually a very strong example [of a stylistic change] for me. It's good writing… it convinces me. It's real – it's an enormous achievement compared to Original Sin 1 for me.

Swen: ...took sweat and blood and tears...

Bubbles: …how much has your writing team changed?

Swen: You'll be surprised, maybe, to hear that the leads on this team are the same writers that wrote OS 1. But they have time now, and time makes a very big difference. We've been iterating the writing [a lot]; if I would show you the initial dialogues, you'd say “that's shit!”, but that's just the process, right? Writing is something were you need to have time to go over it, start to get into the characters. We now have 8 writers, and they now have time to get into the heads of every single character and they have to “speak” like that character. So we think about each character: “What would they say? Would they say that? No, they probably wouldn't say that.” So it changes and changes, and the result… it feels a little better. We were also very explicit that it had to be the way you talk… it's a much more natural conversation style now. Of course, you played that noble [The Red Prince] and he still talks like a noble, but that's “him”; that's because of his upbringing. If you take Lohse [a lady who acts as a vessel for demons and spirits], she's gonna be talking like a jester, which is a completely different tone; same thing goes for Sebille, she was a slave in the Ancient Empire, so she's very bitter, she hates everything. It really changes from character to character; it's also different writers who write each of them, so they can really get into their heads.

Bubbles: Which part of this writing is by Chris Avellone?

Swen: He's doing the Undead origin story, and that one you're not seeing. That's gonna be something very special, so we're keeping that for later. So you haven't actually seen any of Chris's writing yet.

Bubbles: You mentioned 8 writers – who are they?

Swen: Let's see, we have Sarah Baylus, we have Jan Van Dosselaer, Devin Doyle, Charlene Putney, John Corcoran, Steven… uhmmm… Steven, so that's six, then Kevin vanOrd, then Chris, eight, and Kieron [Kelly], nine. So it's actually eight and a half, cause Kieron does writing as well as other artistic stuff.

Bubbles: Do you think that's a good amount of writers for the kind of project you're doing?

Swen: Yeah, I think so. The output of these people if they “just write” is enormous; I could fill what other games have in ten days with a team like that. But they don't [“just write”], because they take so much time with each dialogue.

Bubbles: If you've hired more people over the last few months, does that mean that the game has expanded in scope?

Swen: We've hired more people because we've learned we needed more. I will be brutally honest about this: we only figured out the identity of the game a couple of months ago. We were looking a long time for the right tone, and now that we've we figured it out – it's easy!

Bubbles: What did you figure out?

Swen: How people should talk. The length of the dialogues, the length of the phrases, the way that they talk, the things that they say – we figured that out a couple of months ago because of Sarah. It started with that one character that Devin did; we were playing Act 1, and we said, “That's a really good character!” Sarah picked up on that; she changed all of Fort Joy to fit that, and then we all played it and said “Fuck, this is good!” And then we started expanding it everywhere and we rewrote pretty much everything.​

I know that a lot of the regulars around here were holding their breath, anxiously awaiting the next entry in the prestigious RPG Codex [Quickie] review series, and despite that it took years for the next entry to emerge, Konjad bounces back big time, bringing us his retrospective review on the merits of Zero Sum's Prelude to Darkness.

The turn-based RPG called Prelude to Darkness was released many years ago. So many years that its most current version is already a decade old. Nonetheless, few role-playing games fans have even heard of it and even fewer played it. Here, on RPGCodex, we even have an official subforum for this game… and it’s almost dead. Posts rarely are written there and few people bother to even visit the place. Is the fate of the game well deserved or is it just a decent product that never managed to gather enough players to reach the critical mass of popularity and spread around through positive word-of-mouth?​

The tactical turn based RPG The Great Whale Road is entering Early Access today, and we've had the great pleasure of receiving a preview copy, as well as the distinctly lesser pleasure of playing through it.

What does the game have to offer for the discerning hardcore RPG fan? Everybody's favourite front page writer Bubbles has the scoop:

Boredom and monotony. Unceasing repetition. The mind is sedated, lulled to sleep among the endless waves. No hope. No relief. [...]

On paper, The Great Whale Road seems like a perfectly interesting little game; it's basically a cross of The Banner Saga and King of Dragon Pass, staged in the historical setting of the North Sea around the year 650 AD. You play the newly selected leader (male or female) of a small Danish settlement; storylines for the Picts, Franks, and Northumbrians are promised to follow later in development. As the chieftain, you have to manage the economy of your settlement while simultaneously playing through a linear storyline of political frictions and intrigue. You have to decide how to distribute your people's manpower between diplomacy, trade, warfare, or any of the various ways of gaining food; you need to deal with a variety of random events, from pirates to the plague; and you have to lead your warband into turn based battles against your people's enemies. During the winter months, you rest at home; during the summer months, you set sail to trade and parley with your neighbours. Sounds good, right?

And yet, in the current state of the game, none of these elements are actually fun. [...]

Should you go play The Great Whale Road right now? Absolutely not, you'd be bored stiff! But should you buy it right now? Well, perhaps. The game is coming off a failed Kickstarter, and the Early Access income would probably be helpful to Sunburned Games in their efforts to deliver a complete and hopefully entertaining experience. If the idea of a Banner Saga/KoDP hybrid with lots of stats and random events is inherently appealing to you, and you have money to spare for a game that so far delivers nothing except some pretty 2D screens and a half-complete campaign full of shallow and repetitive gameplay, then you might as well throw some funding at this project. Support your indie developers! Just keep in mind that none of the promised features are actually guaranteed to ever make it into the game.​

Well, they can't all be winners. Maybe we'll check back in a few months and see how the game has improved.

As a PC RPG focused website, it's been a while since we covered anything PnP. The last prominent instance of that, I believe, was our 2014 review of Monte Cook Games's Numenera, on which the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera by inXile is based. Well, recently, Monte Cook Games contacted us to see if we were interested in reviewing Torment: The Explorer's Guide, a PnP sourcebook accompanying the video game and exploring the same region of the Ninth World.

Given that Tides of Numenera is a game a lot of people here are looking forward to, it shouldn't come as a surprise that we agreed to review the new sourcebook. Thankfully, esteemed community member and everyone's favorite Pillars of Eternity reviewer Prime Junta agreed to help us with that, and was prompt enough to write up his impressions that we are publishing this on the day the review embargo has been lifted.

Too bad he didn't really like the book much, though, aside from the Bloom. Here are a couple of snippets from the review:

Torment: The Explorer’s Guide is a pen-and-paper sourcebook which describes the setting for inXile Entertainment’s upcoming Planescape: Torment successor. It’s about Greater Garravia, a region around an inland sea beyond the Beyond (a region described in the Numenera corebook). Monte Cook Games made it clear to us that it is not a strategy guide, hintbook, or supplement for the cRPG; rather, it is intended for game masters who want to run pen-and-paper campaigns in the Last Castoff’s footprints.

Sagus Cliffs, the location of the Torment: Tides of Numenera beta, is present in faithful detail in the state it is in before the Last Castoff’s arrival on the scene. The maps and many of the illustrations are plucked directly from the computer game or its concept art. Aligern, Callistege, Tybir, Fulsom, Imbitu, and many other major and minor characters from the game make their appearance. The Guide outlines their behaviour, background, and motivations, and even side quests pop up in “Hearsay” blurbs, although they are presented as adventure hooks only, rather than full-blown quest lines. There isn’t much in the Guide that’s not present, one way or another, in the game – and the game has a good deal of detail the Guide does not cover at all. [...]

With one notable exception, all these locations are standard Numenera fare, not all that different from Guran, Stirthal, or any of the others in the Corebook, although written out in greater detail. They are colourful and filled to the brim with random weirdness, but have little by way of internal logic or coherence, let alone a sense of history or place beyond a general “atmosphere” helpfully described in margin notes. [...] The one area where the Guide rises above its general level of all spice, no curry is the Bloom: a city-sized transdimensional predator inching its way along a ravine near Sagus Cliffs. Thought has gone into what the Bloom is, what it wants, what its capabilities and limitations are, and how it relates to the beings inhabiting and surrounding it. It has some of the internal logic so sorely lacking in the rest of the setting, and consequently the characters and factions in it are much more engaging and relatable than anywhere else. The Memovira is more than just a crimelord in fancy armour. The Bloom cultists and their lost prophet Chila are more than just another robe-wearing victim-sacrificing evil cult. The deranged, damaged, or changed human wrecks circulating in the Bloom’s bowels are more than just local colour. The Bloom shows that an imaginative world-builder can take the random bits and pieces of weird scattered around the Ninth World and make something genuinely exciting out of them. [...]

Other than the relatively unproblematic descriptors and foci, the translation of cRPG gameplay into pen-and-paper form has not been altogether successful. One of the most notable features of Castoffs is their extreme resilience and rapid healing. The Guide mentions this in the description, but provides no mechanical explanation of its gameplay effects, leaving that entirely to the GM to arbitrate. Instead, it introduces a Tidal Surge mechanic which triggers whenever the Castoff takes damage: the Surge passes some of that damage to someone else in some particular form, fixed on character creation. One castoff might cause a selected enemy to go blind, another might cause him to get stunned, or run away in fear, or take extra Intellect damage. This is shallow and repetitive, an automatically-applied awesome-button mechanic requiring no thought to use, and which will get boring fast – more so if playing with a full party of Castoffs.

Worse, however, is the Tides mechanic as described in the Guide. [...] The mechanic, in other words, requires the GM to be so intimately familiar with what each of the Tides is that he can award and track Tidal points on the fly, without interrupting the flow of the action or conversation, and the outcome is a vaguely-defined “reputation” plus something which allows attuned players to awesome-button every single tidally-conformant action with pyrotechnic critical successes every time. This, in a game explicitly intended to be as fluid, low-accounting, and low-arithmetic as possible, and one where most actions are already trivialised through the Effort and Recovery mechanics. Both the awarding/bookkeeping and eventual and occasional scripted results of tidal affinity can work perfectly well in a computer game, but defined this way for pen-and-paper… really, people, did you even playtest this?​

Ouch. I believe George Ziets was involved with the computer game version of the Bloom, so I wonder if his designs influenced how it's portrayed in the sourcebook too - and why it stands out compared to other locations.

The Technomancer is the new sci-fi B-movie RPG from Spiders, developers of Mars: War Logs and Bound by Flame. If that doesn't exactly fill you with interest or enthusiasm, I don't blame you. Apparently, just like Mars: War Logs, Technomancer takes places on Mars, in a dystopian society controlled by large corporations, and has you play the eponymous technomancer with some kind of electro force powers.

Now, we've never reviewed any of Spiders' games before, and I never imagined we'd end up reviewing this one either. However, somehow, esteemed community member and Codex Gamescom reporter Bubbles has gotten hold of a review key for the game - and has a few things to say about it. So if you feel like playing a low-budget action RPG that's somewhat rough around the edges, or simply reading about one, here's what The Technomancer has in store for you.

As it turns out, The Technomancer is neither a great success nor an outright failure; it's simply a solid story RPG that is hamstrung by an omnipresent lack of polish and a few thoroughly stupid design decisions. Together, all of these flaws and little bits of weirdness infuse the game with a strong sense of character, a character which some people will find appealing and others repulsive.

[...] Overall, I would describe The Technomancer's writing and presentation as “not great, but entertaining.” Going into my playthrough, I was prepared for a low-budget experience with a unique atmosphere; the game not only met those criteria, but also provided a bit more depth than I expected. Still, the quality of the writing by no means comparable to the greats of the genre, and if you go into this story expecting another New Vegas or Alpha Protocol, you're going to be most severely disappointed. If I say that the writing is more interesting than the typical mainstream fare, I mean to say that I liked it more than Fallout 3, Fable, Drakensang, or Venetica – no more, no less. [...] Maybe I've been spoiled by the likes of Age of Decadence, Fallout New Vegas and The Witcher 2, but in this day and age, I simply can no longer see the merit of stuffing so much purely cosmetic c&c into your game. If Spiders could not offer a properly reactive main quest on the budget they had available, then they would have been better off cutting the game down to a more manageable size and providing proper branching. I'd much rather have a 15 hour RPG where my decisions have a real, noticeable impact on the story than a 30 hour game where even murdering a major character will ultimately only affect a side quest or two.

[...] The Technomancer is billed as an action RPG, and thankfully its combat system is fluid and fast paced enough to accommodate some fun, fast paced gameplay. Certain experienced hardcore RPG players have actually levelled harsh complaints against this system; they consider the combat to be far too difficult even on normal settings. Supposedly, the enemies deal far too much damage and have access to game breaking attacks that are not available to the player, which makes the main character feel “normal” and “weak”, and not like the superhuman badass he is supposed to be. Strictly speaking, these complaints are accurate; you have to play carefully and evasively, making constant use of dodge or block moves and carefully timing your strikes if you want to have any success against the many large groups of enemies and the decently dangerous bosses in the game. The controls are also slightly clunky, especially when it comes to locking onto enemies for ranged attacks; it's not enough to ruin the game, but it will force you to adapt to the system. At least one of your abilities even deals friendly fire (!!!), which is a truly bold and dangerous move in a time when even old-school devs like Obsidian are moving away from friendly fire mechanics.

[...] What does all of this amount to? In my appraisal, The Technomancer is a good low-budget game with a few significant flaws that might be alleviated by future patches. As far as the current version is concerned, prospective players should search their souls whether any of the game's positive sides can outweigh the tedium of clearing out endless respawns in the same area again, and again, and again. For me, the benefits still barely managed to outweigh the cons, though I would never consider replaying this game until the respawn rate is reduced.

Of course, I also received this review key for free, so I could afford to approach the game without worrying whether I was getting good value for my money. The Technomancer is currently being sold for 44,99€ on the Steam store, and that price may be hard to justify for a game that was very obviously made on a tight budget. Every player has their own idea of what a good purchase price looks like, but if you want my advice, I'd wait until the game is fully patched and at least 60% off. It is worth playing, but there's no need to rush.​

Whalenought Studios' Serpent in the Staglands was an instant hit the day I posted about its Kickstarter campaign on our forums back in 2014. With its thoughtfully oldschool sensibilities and gorgeous pixel art, not to mention the developers' willingness to directly engage with our community, it quickly rose to the status of one of the Codex's "house indies", alongside worthy titles such as Underrail and Age of Decadence. For that reason, you'd think it would have been easy to find somebody to review the game when it was released in May 2015. Well, more than a year has passed since then, and the consensus on this still-unreviewed title remains unclear. Especially in the wake of Pillars of Eternity and all of its associated drama, many were eager to hold up Serpent in the Staglands as the true successor to the real-time with pause legacy. Others whispered that this alleged indie classic was not so great, and a few even lashed out at it using a particular acronym that I won't repeat here.

Clearly, only a Codex-sanctioned official review could clarify this matter once and for all. After two abortive attempts to produce such a review, including one that resulted in the mysterious disappearance of the reviewer from our forums, the esteemed Deuce Traveler volunteered to take a break from his Elder Scrolls review marathon to write one himself. It's fitting that today, just days after the success of Whalenought's second Kickstarter venture, I can finally offer you the official RPG Codex review of Serpent in the Staglands. Both the good:

This is going to sound odd, but my favorite aspect of Serpent in the Staglands is how it treats the player like an intelligent human being. You won't find a 30 minute tutorial explaining how to walk, manipulate items, or fight in this game. You will have to read the huge and detailed manual, and most likely consult it several times while you play, in order to understand its arcane user interface. I recommend ditching the in-game journal and writing down your own notes using good old pen and paper, and taking your time to read the dialogue. As stated earlier, combat can be extremely deadly and character progression is initially rather slow, so you'll have to pick your battles. There were many locations in the game that were too dangerous for my party at the beginning, so I had to temporarily abandon the idea of exploring them and find other, easier areas to develop my characters' combat proficiency before I could take them on. Money never ceases to be a concern - there always seemed to be some special item I wanted at the blacksmith's shop that kept me motivated to quest for further loot, even towards the end. It's hard for me to recall the last time I played a game that started off so challenging and didn't hold my hand, and it's hard to describe the thrill I felt when I finally earned enough money to buy my main character a better set of equipment, or when he reached his third level. Character progression is well-paced - slow enough to make you feel that you earned it, fast enough to prevent frustration.​

And the bad:

Serpent in the Staglands' combat is real-time with pause, but it's pretty tactically simplistic. Although I enjoyed trying out new spells and skills, I ultimately found it to be a boring experience. Because combat is so fatal and I didn't want to experience the game's ridiculously long loading times (about 53 seconds on average) every time I lost a character, I ended up taking advantage of its poor enemy AI. My main tactic was to position one of my melee characters just at the edge of an enemy's field of vision to get him to attack, then retreat back to the rest of the party, overwhelming the suicidal enemy with ranged attacks and superior numbers. Wash, rinse, and repeat to get through an entire dungeon or wilderness area. Enemy encounters aren't very diverse, either. Even in the game's final stages, my party was still mostly fighting heavily armored melee opponents, with very few ranged and magic-using enemies to be found. Enemies often drop loot that does not match what you'd expect them to have. Sometimes I fought bandits and found a weapon and shield but no armor, even though they seemed to be be wearing leather. But then again, with the game's low level of graphical detail, maybe they were wearing just brown clothes?​

On his second day at the Digital Dragons convention in Cracow last month, Codex representative Jedi Master Radek met up with former Obsidian creative director and current freelancing man of mystery Chris Avellone, who was there to give a talk. He arrived with a big list of questions contributed by our users, and in the resulting 54 minute interview, Chris answered every last one. There's a lot to unpack here, including new information about the unique mechanics in Black Isle's cancelled Fallout 3 (AKA Van Buren) and about Obsidian's unsuccessful pitch for Knights of the Old Republic 3. I'll quote those parts:

JMR: What was the storyline for the third KotOR game? What would the player do in the Sith Empire? Was it going to be structured like the first two KoTORs: prologue, four planets and then the ending? Or something else?

MCA: So it was gonna be a little bit different. So basically, I think I've said this before, but the player would be following Revan's path into the Unknown Regions, and he goes very, very deep into the Unknown Regions and finds the outskirts of the real Sith Empire. And that's a pretty terrifying place. The intention was that it would be structured on a basic level like KotOR 1 and KotOR 2, but what would happen is you'd have a collection of hubs, but every hub you went to had an additional circuit of hubs, that you could choose which ones you optionally wanted to do to complete that hub, or you could do them all. But ultimately there was just a lot more game area in KotOR 3, just because the Sith Empire was just so fucking big. But yeah, so, on some level it was a similar structure, but it was intended to... so one of our designers, Matt MacLean, had this idea for Alpha Protocol mission structure, where what would happen is, you'd sort of go to a hub, but it wasn't really a hub, it was like a big mission you had to do as an espionage agent, but then there were like six surrounding missions, that central mission, and you didn't have to do any of them, but by doing some of those, you would cause a reaction in the main target mission that could even make your job worse or easier. Or you could choose to try and do all of them, and he let each of them like cater to like, a speech skill, or stealth mission, or shoot 'em up mission, and that would cause different reactivity. And I always liked that, because I felt like you were being given a larger objective, but you were getting a lot more freedom in how to accomplish it and how to set the stage, so it was easier for your character. And that's kind of the mission structure I would have liked to have bring to KotOR 3, because I thought it was much more intelligent design.

JMR: When you worked on Van Buren, what aspect of it did you like the most?

MCA: I liked the idea that the interface was kind of like a mini-dungeon you could explore. The idea when Van Buren was... your Pip-Boy actually didn't start out with all its functionality. Like you had some basic programs, so it acted like a normal interface, but the more you did certain things in the environment, like if you discovered, like, how to set off a fire alarms or you set a fire in a building and the fire alarms went off, suddenly a new functionality of your Pip-Boy, ”Here, let me find all the emergency exits for you!” And then suddenly all of those would be lit up on the map. And you're like, “Oh, wait a minute, I can use this as like a tracking mechanism to figure out where all the exits are.” And you could do that for things like fire suppression system, things like... like where the power sources are in buildings. You could use it to do autopsies on robots and steal their programs, and suddenly your Pip-Boy sort of became like this arsenal that you could use to sort of like navigate the environment. That was cool. And the other thing was... the adversaries in Van Buren could also use your Pip-Boy against you to both cloak their location and track where were you going, so you could actually end up in like a Pip-Boy war, where you're trying to track down each other using a Pip-Boy. So we tried to do a little bit of that in Fallout: New Vegas - Dead Money, where the Botherhood of Steel guy was trying to use the... which basically could have taken over your Pip-Boy, but that was axed, and they were like, “No, you can't do that”, so like, “Oh, shit.”

JMR: Van Buren was supposed to have another party in the world that would wander around and complete quests. Can you tell us how that was supposed to work?

MCA: Yeah, basically what they would do is they would go to alternate locations, and they had their own agenda path they were trying to follow to accomplish certain objectives. And the trick with them is each one of the rival party members actually had a separate agenda, which they didn't fully share with everybody else in the party. So sometimes they would do certain things at locations where it worked with one of their agendas but nobody else's, but the other guys wouldn't know about it, so you could use that against them, where you're like, ”Well you know that guy in that location left a note for us to follow you”, and they're like, “Oh my god! Are you a traitor?” [shooting sounds] But... it was basically a very heavily scripted NPC mechanic, where we were like, we're trying to increase reactivity and the sense the world was moving on. So, when the player characters would go to one location and do a bunch of stuff, they would be notified that something else was happening in the location and those guys would take care of the quests in an area or conquer that location, and you were like, “Oh, shit”, like, “We gotta move.” But it was all intended to give the sense that something else was happening in the world without waiting for you.​

Two guest speakers were of particular interest to the Codex at the digital entertainment convention Digital Dragons in Cracow earlier this month. Both were related to Obsidian Entertainment, which is, as you know, the second most discussed video game company at the Codex after Bethesda. One of those was the Codex favorite Chris Avellone, who left the company not so long ago under mysterious circumstances. The other was Obsidian's CEO Feargus Urquhart.

Luckily for us, esteemed community member Jedi Master Radek from Poland volunteered to attend the event. We got him the press accreditation, and arranged the interviews. Today, we're posting his conversation with Feargus; Chris Avellone will be next.

FU: So. What was found out, I don't know how it was found out, but, so we hired Leonard Boyarsky, from Blizzard, and Leonard...[searches for good words] was one of the co-founders... was one of the co-creators of Fallout, and one of the co-founders of Troika. So we hired Leonard and Tim Cain works for us, and Tim Cain and Leonard are not working on Tyranny or Eternity or Armored Warfare, so we might be working on something and they might be the guys that are looking into what we're doing.

JMR: They are not working on Eternity? [I didn't hear Eternity in the previous sentence]

FU: Nope.

JMR: They are working together?

FU: They are working together, yeah.

JMR: How is Leonard Boyarsky doing? Is he working on-site?

FU: [laughs] Yes. So, yeah. Leonard's doing good. It's been interesting... it's funny to... you know, we worked so much together in '96 and '97 and we then... of course, Leonard left and I've talked to him a number of times, but not a ton since they left, I mean because when they left Black Isle, it was... it was complicated, you know. There was... I was... I would say, I was angry to an extent, because it was frustrating. I now had to go make a game, you know, suddenly and Interplay needed the revenue, so I had to get a game done fairly quickly and that was frustrating to me. And while this was all going on they were hiring people away from us... so I was sure some of it with Leonard was that I... I certainly didn't reach out, but you know, we've talked a number of times, you know, since Obsidian started and you know, it was interesting... he actually reached out to Chris Jones, who is one of the founders of Obsidian, who also worked, he worked at Troika and it was about like: Hey, you know what about and he's just really interested in doing single player RPGs again. And hey, we're the spot for single player RPGs. And so it's been easy in a lot of ways because it's like going back to someone you know, like, you worked with so much, so we kinda know each other even though twenty years have gone by. [laughs] You know, and I think it's worked out and I think Leonard's learned an amazing amount of stuff from having to run a company and then working at a big developer like Blizzard and so I think that... no, it's been good. I'm very hopeful that we'll come up with something cool.

JMR: A question you'll like - what does Obsidian think of romances?

FU: [laughs] So I... this is such a weird thing. I play romances in video games. I'm probably getting in trouble for saying this... I play the romances because it gets me experience and I get perks or I get things for doing them, right? So I don't gravitate to doing them. I know that's me personally. And I know, like... because I read a lot of fantasy books and to be honest, I... there's the romance part in the fantasy books and I like that part. Not too much, right? But I like that aspect of fantasy books. I don't read romance, like full romance, but I like that part. So it's interesting, I like it as the part of the book, but I just don't gravitate towards it in a game. But I reckon it is that people really enjoy them, and also what romances are, it's like when we don't talk about them, it's like we're ignoring this whole part of sort of, you know, the human experience. Like people are, people will go out and you know. So it seems like, you know... I think if we were to do them, like I want them to not feel forced. Like I think there's a number of games out there, which I'm not gonna name, that the romances feel forced. It just feels like I'm going through the motions. I feel like I'm just clicking the dialogue. Now I think some people really enjoy them, but still that's what I wouldn't wanna do. If we do them I want them to feel real. I don't know... I can't tell you if that means there needs to be full, you know, CGI sex scenes or not full CGI... I don't even know how would we do it. But apart from... you know, the goal is to have them feel natural.​

As is well known, the genre of squad-based tactical games is distinguished from RPGs by the fact that there is an entire squad of people running around and killing things in turn-based combat. Mordheim: City of the Damned is one of these games. Developed by an obscure Canadian company and set in the world of Warhammer, it has you control a tactical unit known as warband and lead it... somewhere, preferably to victory. Standard stuff, you know.

But before you get all excited for a Warhammer tactical game, you have to ask: is it actually any good? This question is where esteemed community member Darth Roxor comes in with his review.

Here's his conclusion if you're curious:

Nevertheless, despite ending the previous chapters on rather negative notes, my overall opinion of Mordheim is completely different. I think the fact that I currently have 80 hours of the game clocked on Steam, and that I’ve been playing it all the time for the entire last month, is enough of an indicator how much fun I’ve had with it. In those 80 hours, I’ve only managed to get one warband to max rank (Skaven, took me a whopping 60 hours in total) and take another one half-way through its campaign.

Simply put, Mordheim is just a solid game of squad tactics. If you’re a sucker for the genre and for the world of Warhammer, you should get it immediately. But even if Warhammer is unknown to you, The City of the Damned offers loads of content and plenty of good, old-fashioned fun. You just have to make sure to turn a blind eye on its remarkably bad technical side.

To be honest, I have no idea how many of the things I’ve praised or lambasted in this article can be traced to the original tabletop, and which are the work of Rogue Factor. But whatever the case may be, as a debut loaded with expectations from an unknown studio, Mordheim is proof enough that the lads have talent.​

I must confess that, until now, I haven't even heard much about the indie tactical RPG The Dwarf Run and it slipped completely under my radar. I bet few of you have played it, or even heard about it, either. The dedicated thread in our General RPG Discussion forum can also hardly be described as particularly active.

Still, the Codex is the kind of site to review an obscure super-low-budget Russian indie RPG - and it looks like this time there may be a gem behind the rough facade. Good thing esteemed community member Bubbles actually played the game, liked it, and wrote this review almost literally overnight. Here's his conclusion:

The Dwarf Run is primarily a combat game, and a surprisingly good one at that. Sure, it has a number of flaws (most obviously the opaque movement system, the janky camera, and the mediocre AI), but it also offers enough complexity and variety to keep a seasoned RPG player fully engaged from start to finish. For a tiny indie operation from Russia, this is already a great feat; but even in comparison with other modern combat-heavy games, TDR looks pretty good. Pillars of Eternity is certainly a much bigger and grander game, but it's also insidiously buggy, vulnerable to overleveling and rest spam, and stuffed full of trash mobs, which are completely absent from TDR. Blackguards 1 features higher production values and a slightly larger array of spells and abilities, but its balance and difficulty curve are badly out of whack, and the writing is generally snoozy; meanwhile, TDR (on the hardest difficulty setting) offers a continuously challenging, well-tuned experience. And say what you want about TDR's writing, but it's certainly never boring or predictable.

Over the course of this review, I've compared The Dwarf Run to Blackguards 1, Anachronox, and Frayed Knights; I find all three of those games to be highly enjoyable, and putting The Dwarf Run in the same category is high praise indeed. However, I'm not blind to the fact that all of these titles only have niche appeal, even by Codex standards. Perhaps The Dwarf Run is one those games that can only be successful on an extremely low budget; Steamspy claims that it's currently sold about 1,000 copies at “full price” (meaning €8.99) and another 9,000 in a super cheap bundle sale. Fortunately, that seems to have been good enough: TDR's developer Alexander Mirdzveli has already started development on a prequel, and the franchise's future seems assured. I'm quite happy about that.​